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Rink Rats: Sauce and Jam

Coach is telling me to keep my head and stay out of the box, but I find myself unable to skate away from Adam, after he has given me a friendly facial amid the rink-rat scrum. So allow me to chirp a moment, before I get back to the games.

I am definitely too young to remember the Montagnards, but I’m afraid I’m old enough to know about the Russians. I grew up revering those Red Army teams, and rooting for them, actually, in their games against the Canadian All-Stars, because of their elegant, wheeling approach to the game, and the way my father said their names, as if they were secrets. It was only during the Olympics, in 1980, that the Russians became the bad guys, because the opponent this time was a bunch of college boys from the States—not a thug among them. One theory has it that the N.H.L.ers’ encounters with the Russians in those Cold War years brought some of the latter’s creativity and flair to the North American game, in advance of the eventual appearance of Russians in the league. You could say they undid some of what the McGill swells apparently did to ruin the beautiful game of proto-hockey.

Adam’s work on the sociological origins of the game is fascinating—who’d-a-thunk it was the rich kids who made it so rough. I’d always heard/thought it was the mining-camp/prairie-pond hard guys who had made it so. But favoring the Montagnard strain over the mutt blend that came to be played, during the next hundred years, is a little like complaining that English was a better language before the arrival of the Normans, or to privilege Scott Joplin over John Coltrane.

Sure, hockey wasn’t always rough. Hockey wasn’t always even hockey. But hockey, as it has been played in North America for many decades—the hockey that my generation, and our fathers’, and even theirs’, grew up playing, coaching, and watching, the hockey of Eddie Shore, Gordie Howe, and Bobby Orr, or of Dino Ciccarelli and Zarley Zalapski, or of Boris Mikhailov and Slava Fetisov, or of pee-wee teammates and high-school heroes—has always been a contest of time and space. Both are hard to come by on a crowded, bounded ice sheet. The game is essentially a battle for it; you try to acquire time and space for yourself and your teammates, and take both away from your opponents, by means of speed, guile, strength, teamwork, and force. This occasionally, and I say necessarily, involves collisions and physical battles (say it Canadian), which will occasionally result in injuries: gushing blood, broken bones, missing teeth, and, yes, concussions. It will also result in occasional spasms of excess, be they vicious or clownish. All this makes hockey that much more compelling—operatic, funny, hard. It’s a battle out there. It takes courage to play it. And if you’re up for that, it is fun as hell.

In European hockey—hockey played in Europe, not hockey played by Europeans when they come here—the ice surface is larger. They don’t hit nearly as much. They can fool around with the puck and avoid contact. It’s also relatively boring. It’s worth noting that the M.V.P. in 2010 of the K.H.L., the Russian pro league and second-best league in the world, is now playing in the N.H.L. playoffs, for the Nashville Predators, and he is embarrassing himself by not competing hard enough—and staying out late at the Scottsdale bars.

In Omsk or Zurich, the players can make nifty plays, and the fans have great club songs, and you don’t have to put up with Nickelback, but in order to see the wolverine fury of world-class athletes trying to win on the biggest stage, there is only one league, and that is the N.H.L.

This is not an argument for fighting; I am finally about ready to concede that fighting is dumb. Nor is it an argument for head-hunting, for intentional attempts to injure, for stick-swinging or kneeing or any of the dirty nonsense that afflicts the game—and gets disproportionate attention from the commentariat. Throw the book at them, I say. Kick the bums out. No, this is an argument against comparing N.H.L. hockey to soccer, or for that matter, to women’s hockey, which is basically a different game. Adam wrote, “Women’s hockey continues to scintillate every bit as much as men’s, and with no goonery at all. Hayley Wickenheiser, the captain of the Canadian women’s Olympic hockey team, has a good case to be considered the greatest living hockey player.” I’ve been around this league long enough, Adam, to know that you are trying, in the tradition of Claude Lemieux, to bait me into a taking a dumb penalty—a five and a game, perhaps. I ain’t going to pick on Hayley Wickenheiser, who is a heck of a player. But wait, the ref is looking the other way, so I will merely say, to that statement of yours: No.

When I used the term “violence,” I meant not thuggishness or fighting but rather good, honest wreckage. In the Rangers-Capitals triple overtime game on Wednesday night, Alex Ovechkin nailed Marc Staal with a clean body-check, and then later Staal nailed Ovechkin cleanly too (who returned to the bench with a bemused grin). The Rangers’ blossoming young star of a defenseman Ryan McDonagh, with the puck for a split second lost in his skates, got knocked into next week with a mean but clean check. Dan Girardi had his forehead gashed by his own goalie’s paddle. Brian Boyle, coming off a concussion after a nasty and malicious check in the last series by Chris Neil (unpenalized, borderline), blocks a shot with his cheek. Yet they all kept at it, into the wee hours. This stuff was violence, of a kind, but none of it was thuggish or beyond the pale, and it was mesmerizing. The perseverance is as integral to the sport as the playmaking.

I’d been at the Garden for the previous game, which the Rangers lost, and I was struck, as I often am seeing the pro game live, not only by the immense size and speed of the players, and the consequent lack of open ice, but by the deft things they must do to make things happen in what little space they have. And you see how much that forces them to play the puck in three dimensions. More often then not, they must pass the puck through the air, using what are called saucer passes—the puck is a flying saucer, arcing over opponents’ sticks and landing flat on the ice just in time to hit the tape on the recipient’s stick. When you make, receive, or witness a really good saucer pass, you refer to it as “sauce.” Check out this sauce. That’s some sweet sauce.

Sauce should not be confused with “jam.” Jam is grit, effort, persistence—sheer cussedness. It is a term frequently used by Peter Laviolette, the head coach of the Flyers; he pronounces it with a pleasing sneer. You cannot win a playoff game without it. The Flyers lacked jam in Game 2 and had only smidgeons more last night in Game 3, whereas the Devils have had jam in abundance—robbing the Flyers of time and space, and therefore of Games 2 and 3. Ilya Kovalchuk, after his trip to the therapist, had a goal and two assists. I’m not sure what he had: we’ll call it borscht. I’m hoping the Flyers aren’t toast.

Illustration by Bendik Kaltenborn.

Nick Paumgarten has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2005.